Today I began to sketch a few ideas for our logo, and do a very rough design in photoshop, I wanted to stick to a theme of black grey and white as its appeals to me as sleek and professional however after speaking to the group we decided to brighten up the logo and make it more appealing to our target audience.In the logo below I have added brighter colours to make it more eye catching and appealing to our chosen audience.

Today we finalised the idea for our collaborative project, we decided to carry on with our initial idea of a ‘Bored in Bournemouth’ web application in which users will be able to –

Log onto with there own unique username/password.

Select their preference/type of day out e.g. relaxing, family, romantic, adrenaline.

View a variety of day trips out in bournemouth including prices.

View a Top ten attractions page?

Be able to review a day out and give it a rating.

Users will also be able to add their day out in bournemouth.

These are some features we have decided on that will feature on our Web application, our next step is to start the database process and begin creating links between our web app.

The project so far has been interesting, we have all been assigned roles and I am happy being able to do a lot of the creative and design side of the website. Therefore a lot of my research will be into themes and targeting an audience specifically through design. This week I will be finalising on a colour them and creating banners for the website as well as CSS styles for the buttons.

In the second meeting we finalised on ‘Bored in Bournemouth’ as the name for our web application as we felt it met the necessary target audience. We then began to create and edit our meet the team page with some more information as well as edit the CSS to change the style and make it more appealing.

We also began to look at several different websites with similar intentions as ours, for example tripadvisor, tfl journey planner and so on these websites not only helped us with ways we can lay out our website and display our information but with colour schemes too.

After our first meeting we began to create our ‘Meet the team page’ this page was the start of collaborative project as we had to decide on roles that had to be assigned to each other according to our skills, in doing so we found out we are all on the same page and our skills are similar.

We then discussed the colour theme of blue and white and kept the actual theme of the website very simplistic similar to ‘Apple’s’ theme. After creating a theme and template of our website we began to write a small introduction about ourselves and added a picture to make it more like a profile

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We then added an ‘About’ page which has links to our blogs and a short paragraph explaining our intentions and a bit about the brief of the project. We also added a contact page which Ged inserted a form so users can contact us. I am happy with our progress so far as we’ve agreed on a good idea and have made a good start to our website.

Today I met my group and discussed initial ideas for our collaborative project, we began by brainstorming a few ideas of simple website’s as well as our strengths in this unit to allow us to assign jobs to each of us.

After brainstorming several ideas we decided to stick to the target audience of ‘Tourists’ however after speaking to Rob and as Target audience is a big part of this unit we decided to refine this further until we reached an audience of people visiting bournemouth and families. Our website will be a ‘Day Planner’ in which you can select from a range of different days out (relaxing/romantic/family/etc) and be suggested a range of different days out that we supply in and around bournemouth as well as this we would also make a feature in which users can post their own days out with reviews and pricing making is a participatory website.

We briefly noted down most of the main attractions in bournemouth to see how much data we would be working with.

After our first meeting I am happy with our initial idea and think it will work very well, however we may need to simplify the idea due to there being a lot of information needed, this will be discussed in our next meeting.

After Garrett’s seminar on how to maintain a tidy and professional Weblog I decided to come up with a system to my Blog to ensure all my pages are consistant and data is shown similarly throughout so my blog remains professional and doesn’t get messy, as a good looking blog can achieve higher marks. Garrett went over these specific categories when keeping your blog neat –

Text – When looking at text Garret said to keep everything short and sweet, by the use of small sentences, bullet points etc. in no way should we be writing an essay on our blogs and instead of these big blocks of texts use 2-3 posts per topic to split up the long ‘boring’ posts and make it easier to read, in doing so it keeps the blog alive and in a theme which is easier to read.

Images – In the previous unit I found uploading images tricky as they never sat neatly within a post and seemed to not align with text making my blog messy, however after researching the width of wordpress I found that images with the width of 800px sit nicely within the post and align to either side, therefore making my blog look a lot neater and professional as it all works in a system.

Video – Adding videos to our blogs really brings them to life and allows a viewer to experience what we are posting about in a more interactive way. This can also save us from a lot of text!

Categories – Categories are a big help when blogging consistently as it allows a viewer to jump into a section of your blog easily, however when categorising its good to keep to a minimum amount of categories as on my last blog it became a bit too much and hard to find what you wanted.

Tags – Tagging is very similar to categories and helps keep a thematic flow to your blog as you can relate several pieces of work together in one tag, for example all your research, planning, and final ideas can be stored together in one place, this is a key element in keeping your blog professional and neat.

In today’s seminar we looked into a few database functions called ‘ERD’ Entity Relationship Diagrams. An ERD is a way of organizing and a graphical representation of entities and their relationships to each other through a logical structure of a database.

The original notation for ERD’s used rectangles to represent entities and diamonds to represent relationships, they can also be seen as IDEF1X or a Crow’s foot like the images we used in our seminar below.

Entitiy – is the thing we want to store information, for example a person, place, thing.

Attributes – is the data we are going to collect for an entity.

Relationships – describes the relations between the entities

Below is an example of a Recipe ERD that Simon gave us as an example to show the entity relations and how the database works.

After our lecture on participatory culture we were asked to make a contribution to a community based UGC platform and were given a few examples that ranged from adding photo’s and videos to wikimedia, adding recipes to wikibooks and so on.

I chose to add some detail to Openstreet (www.Openstreetmap.org) which is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world that users can log onto and edit accordingly. This also allows users to access a free map of the world as well as avoid expensive technologies and softwares.

After signing up to OpenStreetMap i decided to add the new Penguin enclosure they are building on Bournemouth beach behind the Oceanarium as it had not yet been added, I liked using OpenStreet as it gives the user a lot more responsibility and freedom and gives users the chance to add details ever so small for example the likes of a ‘tree’.

In today’s lecture with Rob we discussed participatory culture, to begin with we looked at ‘Web 2.0’. Web 2.0 is the network as a platform which converges all devices and is a continually updated service that gets better with the more people that use it. Web 2.0 consumes and remixes data from lots of different sources, including individual users information in a form which is allowed to be remixed by others, creating a network of participation which is on going and goes beyond Web 1.0 and gives rich user experiences.

An example of web 2.0 is WIKI – a social software. This is a great example as WIKI has no defined editors and allows multiple users to change and edit pages, the simplistic plain vanilla web browsers main aim is to offer meaningful topic associations and is done so collaboratively.

Another good example of participatory culture that you may not even be aware of is youtube, a community in which everyone uploads videos in which supplies with content to watch, without these users youtube would merely be a piece of software with no content.

When looking at participatory culture we also watched a video on shared culture and ‘CC’ the creative commons which allows users to decide whether they want other uses to be able to remix, copy or change their work and in doing so they would have to reference the creator, therefore giving them credit and allowing users to still share someone’s work without the law or copyright getting involved.

After looking at participatory culture It made me realise that a lot of web based applications would not run without the huge audiences they carry, for example going back to Youtube. Youtube would not work if users stopped uploading to the site as there would be no content to watch, therefore audiences are a huge part of participatory culture and make these shared websites a lot more interesting as there is so much different content available.